Hypnopompic Hallucinations

From jennymc - I forgot my login here... :) ... but to answer your question:

The hypnotherapy wasn't aimed at brainwashing myself not to see them, I was desperate, I would have tried that, actually, but the hypnotherapist had me focus on the emotions I felt when I saw them, which was primarily: FEAR, MEGA-FEAR, evil and depression. So the sessions were focused on those feelings. I told her all kinds of stuff in those sessions, and I didn't ( and kind of still don't in some ways ) see how it related back to the hallucination, but I can't deny I'm basically cured now. The last 12 months, I've only seen a handful of things and, surprisingly, all but one was very positive ( THAT only started happening after I did this ). When I saw the negative one, I went back and visited her again, and haven't seen anything negative again since. So, that is the long answer, but yes, it ended up not making me afraid, but the point of the sessions was me focusing on my fear and dealing with that, digging up all kinds of crazy stuff ( some of it pretty intense itself ) that might be imagery for me dealing with complex things or past lives, who knows, I don't really care. All I know is it WORKED for me and has been the longest lasting genuine cure.

I am happy that it worked for you. I know that the emotion my auditory

hypnogogic and mainly hypnopompic hallucinations cause is the same as yours: fear. I am afraid of the noises and sounds because they startle me and though I know they happen as I am awakening, I feel like they awaken me. My heart pounds and won't stop and I may be developing heart problems after 15 years of this. I am not young.

I saw a therapist for quite some time and he did not help me at all. I saw another one who gave me anti-depressants and all they did was turn me into a zombie. I now see a neurologist and he gives me sleep med. Honestly the only thing that helps is to knock myself out so that if I do awaken I am too sleepy to be frightened.

I stopped taking my sleep med carefully over a long period of time, hoping that I would just be able to return to normal, and though I have gotten completely over the need for the medicatin to initiate sleep, the hypnopompic hallucinations are still there.

My Rheumatologist wants me to have a sleep study...Perhaps.

I am just happy things are better for you. And I hope it continues.

Why don't you try hypnotherapy too? It might really work for you. And I'm with you there - I've always felt that the hallucinations woke me, too. It can't hurt to try - better than taking all those meds that mess with you physically...

It could be sleep paralysis, it often occurs in REM sleep. People might experience some type of paranormal events or even be unable to move.

Wow, very interesting to hear that so many others have similar cases to mine. I've never had sleeping problems such as sleep talking/walking, up until about 2 years ago when this started happening to me. Almost every "episode" would consist of at least one or a few people in my room, and it's always someone that I know; being a friend or acquaintance. The strange thing is that although I know I'm awake talking aloud to them, I never think of it as weird that they are in my room while I am trying to sleep. As soon as I come to the realization that they shouldn't be there (which is often when I reach out to touch them and can't), then they usually disappear. I've only "seen" an animal once, which was a skunk the night that I was actually chased by one before going to bed. This used to be a rare occurrence, but it's gotten to the point where it happens almost every night. I'm not sure what to do... and I just got a roommate for the first time and definitely don't want to freak her out :/ I should add that none of these experiences are ever scary; just annoying when I realize how much sleep was lost in talking to someone who wasn't there.

I've been trying to find out the name of what I've been going through for years and am so happy to have found it.

I've been suffering from these visions since I was around 9 or 10 years old (now 20), they are mostly just people that I know in my room. When I was younger I would get nervous that my friends were over my house and it was late and I would panic about how I would sneak them out. I'd also be self conscious because I'd be in pyjamas and one night after hallucinating that I was still at a teen night club and that I was on the dance floor, I got up to put on some proper clothes. It was when I turned on the light that I realised I was at home. I got a lot better about knowing when these hallucinations weren't real by turning on the tv or a light on shining my phone around the room. I think they happen more after an eventful or exciting day/night. 

The hallucinations are both visual and auditory. I see my friends and try to have conversations with them. I whisper because I don't want to wake anyone up (it's like I know they aren't really there.) I'm always ignored though and it's like I'm not included in my hallucinations, they just happen in front of me.

The scariest I've ever had was just a couple of months ago while in my student house. It's an old house and very creepy. This particular hallucination could possibly have been a dream, although very complicated as I was dreaming that I was dreaming and can't actually tell whether I woke. I 'woke up' (may have been dreaming) to see an old woman standing by the side of my bed. When I closed my eyes she was still there and I had to fight to keep my eyes from closing. Every time my eyes would shut she would get closer to me and when I tried to scream no sound would come out and I felt like I couldn't move. Like I said, it was all so vivid and strange and seemed to involve a dream within a dream, so I don't know if this was a traditional hallucination or just me having a dream about hallucinating. Either way, I've never suffered anything like this before. 

Reflecting back on my experiences with hallucinations, I think they have always been more common while sleeping in a single bed, or in an unknown place like a hotel. I don't know whether this is coincidence or not.

I was diagnosed with depression and anxity at the beginning of try 6th grade year now I am turning 14 and for the past 2 years just after getting diagnosed i have been having hallucination the difference I have is I am completly awake and in complete control the are never violent and never cause harm the very greatly thought it could be about a show or cartoon I just watched and I could be a charater or it could invole my family and things i say to them that I dont  normally say very rarly does it invole anything death or violently related only once I imagined as I walked down the street that the person across the road was i going to come shoot me and kill me slowly with the gun and a big knife then my parents would come a just stand and cry during all this i would just be walking down the street ino body looking at me and no noticeable change in my personality just a recently have I accepted the fact that something is wrong with my mental state I have not told any family or consoltated my doctor who checks on my much rent medication and other diagnoses I get a little afraid when I get these feelings but they also give me a outlet to talk to as my depression implies i have few close friends and so trouble socially my anxity is more so regarding the safety's of only fair lily and others around me but the hallucinations just set me off I am very hesitant about telling others and very confused on what is happening weather or not I can piece it a good thing or something horrible and wrong i just want to have another opinion yup lease help

Well, you should know that you are not alone. There is a lot more of this stuff happening than people will EVER admit to. :) And regarding the social anxiety ... give yourself a break. :) Very few of us fit in well at 14. Hypnopompic is when you wake up from sleep. Hypnogogic is BEFORE you sleep. I have Hypnopompic, my sister has a combo of both pompic and gogic type hallucinations. I've answered on this thread before ( I'm the one where hypnotherapy really worked for me and still has for about 4 years now ), and in my case, I believe the hallucinations are the results of emotional issues that I'm dealing with, the really strong ones, and they never went away until I got to the root. I don't think anything is horrible and wrong with you. :) Maybe you are just like so many of us on this planet, you have deep emotions that are just trying to come out. Don't be scared or depressed about it and know that YOU are in control. The turning point for me was when the hypnotherapist asked me to try to identify the first emotion that I felt during an episode. For me it was fear/depression, and we started from there, peeling back the onion of why I was afraid and depressed. Once I got to the root, the hallucinations basically stopped. I still see something once or twice a year - very different from 3 times a night.

It's so interesting to read other people's experiences regarding hypnopompic hallucinations. It's a relief to find that I'm not alone in this, and that there's a "name" to what's been going on with me in the past 6 months or so. I don't have narcolepsy, so I would be happy to find out what other causes this could have...I guess I'll have to go see a doctor, since the hallucinations are making me nervous and afraid about sleeping/having them and this seems to be making falling asleep harder. I normally see insects, floating objects or people, and these visions are so sudden and scary that they cause me to shout really loud (to the point of waking up my sister, who sleeps in another room) and throw kicks and punches in the air. I wake myself up with all this screaming and movement, and then the spiders/floating objects/people are gone (fortunately). It all lasts no more than 5 seconds, but it scares the hell out of me, and after these episodes end I find myself sweating, shaking, heart pounding, and confused. It's horrible. :-(

ooh the spiders ,ive seen those too.

I also used to experience this now and then when I was between the ages of 3 (my first living memories) and 10.  These terrifying episodes of paralysis always happened when I was trying to wake up from a bad dream, or what I thought was turning into a nightmare (an unexplained sudden sense of dread or panic and a need to "boogie on out of there" - i.e. wake up).  Oddly, I've never had a "nightmare" that DIDN'T end with this condition, so for me "nightmare" and sleep papralysis were the same thing, although at the time I did not know what it was called or know anyone else who had it. I called them "bzz bad dreams" because of the sound I heard. Maybe I did have what others would call nightmares, but because the level of terror, panic and helplessness never came close in any other dream, so maybe to me an "ordinary nightmare" was a ho-hum walk in the park in comparison. To my knowledge I never had night terrors, although by definition I would not remember them the next morning anyway. I am not aware of any other parasomnias: I did not sleepwalk or talk in my sleep (that I know), and I did not have narcolepsy or insomnia (I had brief episodes of the latter several years later) and I only remember wetting my bed once (inexplicably) when I was 8. I also had a pretty good sleep schedule, thanks to my parents, the point being that I was never sleep deprived or over tired when these happened, though possibly stressed by daily events I now forget.In my case, the paralysis - in addition to happening at the end of a nightmare, always happened as I was trying to wake up, not fall asleep, so it seems by definition that I had hypnapompic hallucinations, not hypnagopgic, which I just learned is the more rare condition, and strangely suggests the presence of other sleep problems, which I just said I don't have.After reading MANY experience of sleep paralysis of others, the only main difference for me (other than it always being hypnapompic and after a bad dream) is that my eyes could not open. So often I hear of people claiming they open their eyes and look around the room and "see things" but for me, my closed eyes ensured that the terror I was experiencing was contained in the very nightmare dream in which I became lucid and was trying to escape BY WAKING UP, which of course to me meant opening my eyes, obviously, which is perhaps as part of my private regimen of terror why I could not.It seemed like there was always this "threshhold" in these dreams where if I did not react in time to wake up (or so I thought) then I would be "dragged" helplessly into the condition. Perhaps it only happened as the dream turned scary and I just wanted to not be there to experience the fear of it that my jerk reaction was "wake up!" but sometimes it snuck up more slowly, like a sudden feeling of being heavier, like the gravity was stronger or I was being pressed into my bed by some force, or sucked into it, or held by a magnet, or crushed by a heavy weight - whatever scenario by frightened child brain could come up with to explain my condition. Sometimes this would be accompanied by, or start with, a sound. Not the buzzing, but like others said, a change in the air pressure in my ear - somehow the air in the room changed, and its quiet sound, like a door had been opened somewhere, and maybe the heaviness began as a feeling like someone or something was sitting on the side of the bed, pressing it down - it had the feeling like that was happening even though I saw nothing.But the actual terror happened when I tried to fight back. The inability to move was terrifying, and with this came the feeling of being crushed and unable to breathe, and while I struggled helplessly in vain (so weak) to move and take a gulp of air I was trying to scream (to mommy, who else?) for help, but the most I ever heard was a tiny distant voice like from a mountaintop a hundred miles away that nobody else would hear. The sense of dread was unbelievably palpable and the worst feeling of fear I ever had - I literally thought I was dying by some horrible process and that unless I could end it by WAKING UP (moving, breathing, getting a scream out) then I WOULD die. It was never demonic but had a very "evil" feeling about it.Oh yes, the buzzing. The sinister evil loud buzzing that lasted through the duration of this, which was the most confounding aspect of it because it seemed to defy logical explanation (cause or source) to justify it. I guess it sounded like it came from within my head but also it seemed to accompany these tingles or electric vibration waves that would pass through my body. One thing I noticed that I thought important to my survival was this buzzing and electric vibration seemed louder, stronger, more "evil" and more difficult to escape from IF I was sleeping on my back. When this happened on my stomach, it all seemed toned down, milder, less intense buzzing, and the vibrations were more like a bizarrely comforting heavy substance that would slide slowly along my neck and back. (Interestingly, a sensation VERY similar to this occured when I was 14 during my first wet dream, in which I was also on my back but was obviously not a scary dream, and in that the source of the sensation I rationalized was being caused by waves of water flowing over me about a minute prior to the event that gives the dream its name.)I also thought that on my back I was more exposed, like my neck and stomach, and that it was more difficult to sit upright from my waist when paralyzed like this, compared to the upper arm strength (I imagined) I had to push UP from a prone (?) position, in which my back was facing the danger. I would be afraid to fall asleep on my back because of this.I rarely heard voices, but in what was probably my most terrifying dream, I did. I was kneeling down at the top of my driveway with one of my sisters and we were looking at a plant. There was a large black carpenter ant on it and it seemed to be speaking to me, though what I heard was a deep, booming, muffled voice (like God?) coming from the sky. I could not remember exactly what it said (or I've forgotton) except that it ended ominously with "to you!" like a curse. It had the cadence "da-da-da-da-da-da...TO YOU!" Immediately an invisible source pulled my sister backward (kneed still tucked under) to the ground where she began MELTING! which of course also meant dying. I could not move and after she became featureless wax-like slime I suddenly felt an evil grip on my body pulling me backward, and I could not move, breathe or scream and it was the most terrifying moment of my life, like I was about to melt and die from some evil force I was completely helpless to fight. SOMEHOW I was able to struggle free and once my glued-shut eyes were now open I could still feel and hear the tingling and buzzing and panic as it slowly faded. It was during this intense dream (on my back, obviously) that I made the mistake of letting my eyes close again too soon and I was suddenly "sucked" back into the helpless terror/vortex of the dream and had to struggle to esxape the paralysis and suffocation all over again, buzzing sounds and all (except in this case it was just to escape the physical condition while lying in bed, not in the environment of my dream. So perhaps this was the closest I came to hypnagogic since I was falling asleep again, but since it was only seconds after I just woke up perhaps one could argue that I was never fully awake to begin with. Anyway, when I broke free again and woke up I got out of bed, turned the lights on, walked around, probably slapped my head a few times to make sure I was awake, and splash my face. I never let that happen again.Many years later, after I conquered these dreams and learned to wake up from them and eventually to avoid them completely, I had a more benign experience when at college for the first time and had insomnia. After staying up all one night I tried to take a nap. My roommate was in the room studying and while my eyes were closed and I thought I was awake, I heard him click his light off and the room get darker (from behind eyelids) I then "heard" the sound of him plopping in his bed for what I thought was his own nap. I began to heard strange mumbling and I "opened" my eyes to see him trying say something. I tried to mutter "what?" but he could not hear me. When I saw that his eyes were bloodshot and darting inhumanly all over and that he was mumbling gibberish, like speaking in tongues, I said louder "What??" and sat up into what felt like another dimension from my waist up. I felt weak and tingly, perhaps like I was leaving my body, but also that a force was tugging me back to the bed, which after a few seconds I succumbed to, and as soon as I hit the bed my eyes opened and my roommate was still at the desk with the light on. Sounds scary, but it was more interesting than anything. No true terror - on a scale of 1 to 10 it was probably a 1 or 2, compared to my "11" worst nightmare/paralysis. Maybe because there was no buzzing or true paralysis I was trying to escape? I dont' remember feeling suffocated.  Anyway, maybe this qualifies as my one and only hypnagogic experience, since I was falling asleep, and the cause was obviously the stress and sleep deprivation or insomnia, and trying to take a nap, which I never do, but I've heard is a faster gateway to REM sleep.

This has been happening to me for about 6 years. My grandmother is very religious and is a prophetess. She said that this is a psychic/spiritual attack! Pray, pray and believe!

Hope you receive this OK. Sorry to hear abt your problem. I too started to suffer a couple of years ago & have all kinds of people young old men women in the bedroom & often strange yellow streamers flying around. Never see spiders as others do.I do not have narcolepsy & sleep well 8 hrs at least a night. I have found that if I am really tired at bedtime through physical activity they do not occur. You might try that.Saw someone else recommending Klamath Lake Blue Green Algae so will try that.

Hypnopompic hallucination can occur on perfectly healthy people. I myslef have some time to time a sound or a "sounding thought" just before waking up every two months. So it's pretty rare.

This is a well documented area, and there is no problem to that. it can occur during anxiety phases, or stressful periods. Many people think they're turning schizo but it is not the case. Those person don't experience hallucinations at first. They start by having a very decreased motivation, a lack of focus, and difficulty to memorize. If you have tons of projects, and that you are happy, it is just a shitty event in your brain which occurs during the passage from consciousness to unconsiousness.

That's all. Nothing to write home about ;)! So just relax and stop thinking about it. Neuroplasticity exists. The more detached you are from those stufs, the rarest they will be.

Be carefull with hypnotherapy. It can stop them, but it can also makes things worse. It depends of people.